Device-to-device (D2D) communication is an essential part of the future fifth generation (5G) system that can be seen as a “network of networks,” consisting of multiple seamlessly-integrated radio access technologies (RATs). Public safety communications, autonomous driving, socially-aware networking, and infotainment services are example use cases of D2D technology. High data rate communications and use of several active air interfaces in the described network create energy consumption challenges for both base stations and the end user devices. In this paper, we review the status of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization, which is the most important standardization body for 5G systems. We define a set of application scenarios for D2D communications in 5G networks. We use the recent models of 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) and WiFi interfaces in analyzing the power consumption from both the infrastructure and user device perspectives. The results indicate that with the latest radio interfaces, the best option for energy saving is the minimization of active interfaces and sending the data with the best possible data rate. Multiple recommendations on how to exploit the results in future networks are given.

Review of latest advances in 3GPP standardization: D2D communication in 5G systems and its energy consumption models

Since the inception of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) in 1997, wireless networking technologies have tremendously grown in the last few decades. The fundamental IEEE 802.11 physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) protocols have continuously been enriched with new technologies to provide the last mile wireless broadband connectivity to end users. Consequently, several new amendments of the basic IEEE 802.11 gradually came up in the forms of IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, and IEEE 802.11g. More recently, IEEE 802.11n, IEEE 802.11ac, and IEEE 802.11ad are introduced with enhanced PHY and MAC layers that boost up physical data rates to the order of Gigabit per second. So, these amendments are generally known as high throughput WLANs (HT-WLANs). In HT-WLANs, PHY layer is enhanced with multiple-input multiple-output antenna technologies, channel bonding, short guard intervals, enhanced modulation and coding schemes. The MAC sublayer overhead is reduced by introducing frame aggregation and block acknowledgement technologies. However, several existing studies reveal that, many a time, the aforesaid PHY and MAC enhancements yield negative impact on various upper layer protocols, that is end-to-end transport and application layer protocols. As a consequence, a large number of researchers have focused on improving the coordination among PHY/MAC and upper layer protocols. In this survey, we discuss impact of HT-WLAN PHY and MAC layer enhancements on various transport and application layer protocols. This paper also summarizes several research works that use aforesaid enhancements effectively to boost up data rate of end-to-end protocols. We also point out limitations of the existing researches and list down different open challenges that can be meaningfully explored for the development of the next generation HT-WLAN technologies.

Impact of IEEE 802.11n/ac PHY/MAC High Throughput Enhancements on Transport and Application Protocols—A Survey

This paper presents the first, to the best of our knowledge, detailed experimental study of 802.11n/ac throughput and power consumption in modern smartphones. We experiment with a variety of smartphones, supporting different subsets of 802.11n/ac features. We investigate the power consumption in various states of the wireless interface (sleep, idle, active), the impact of various features of 802.11n/ac (PHY bitrate, frame aggregation, channel bonding, MIMO) on both throughput and power consumption, and the tradeoffs between these two metrics. Some of our findings are significantly different from the findings of previous studies using 802.11n/ac wireless cards for laptop/desktop computers. We believe that these findings will help in understanding various performance and power consumption issues in today's smartphones and will guide the design of power optimization algorithms for the next generation of mobile devices.

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Power-throughput tradeoffs of 802.11n/ac in smartphones

The surging global mobile data traffic challenges the economic viability of cellular networks and calls for innovative solutions to reduce the network congestion and improve user experience. In this context, user-provided networks (UPNs), where mobile users share their Internet access by exploiting their diverse network resources and needs, turn out to be very promising. Heterogeneous users with advanced handheld devices can form connections in a distributed fashion and unleash dormant network resources at the network edge. However, the success of such services heavily depends on users’ willingness to contribute their resources, such as network access and device battery energy. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for UPN services and design a bargaining-based distributed incentive mechanism to ensure users’ participation. The proposed mechanism determines the resources that each user should contribute in order to maximize the aggregate data rate in UPN, and fairly allocate the benefit among the users. The numerical results verify that the service can always improve users’ performance, and such improvement increases with the diversity of the users’ resources. Quantitatively, it can reach an average 30% increase of the total served traffic for a typical scenario even with only six mobile users.

Efficient and Fair Collaborative Mobile Internet Access

To mitigate the issue of cross-technology interference (CTI) under dense wireless, cross-technology communication (CTC) was recently proposed, which enables direct communication among heterogeneous wireless technologies. We present SymBee, a novel ZigBee to WiFi CTC with symbol-level encoding for performance breakthrough from packet-level state-of-the-arts. SymBee is uniquely built on the new insight on ZigBee-WiFi physical layer cross-observability - i.e., the output on WiFi when fed with ZigBee signal (due to frequency overlap). This is analyzed experimentally and theoretically through rigorous derivations, from which the key innovation in SymBee design, i.e., payload encoding, stems; Conveying data across technologies is as simple as putting specific symbols in ZigBee packet payload, such that they yield unique and easily detectable patterns when cross-observed at WiFi. This symbol-level encoding is fully compatible with any commodity ZigBee device. Decoding at WiFi is a light-weight function that recycles the output from idle listening, thereby minimizing the computation while keeping compatibility to WiFi standard. SymBee is extensively evaluated both theoretically and experimentally through testbed evaluations on six distinct locations including outdoor. The result demonstrate that SymBee reaches the throughput of up to 31.25kbps, 145.4× faster than the state-of-the-art.

Symbol-Level Cross-Technology Communication via Payload Encoding

We conduct the first detailed measurement study of the properties of a class of WiFi active power/energy consumption models based on parameters readily available to smartphone app developers. We first consider a number of parameters used by previous models and show their limitations. We then focus on a recent approach modeling the active power consumption as a function of the application layer throughput. Using a large dataset and an 802.11n-equipped smartphone, we build four versions of a previously proposed linear power-throughput model, which allow us to explore the fundamental trade off between accuracy and simplicity. We study the properties of the model in relation to other parameters such as the packet size and/or the transport layer protocol, and we evaluate its accuracy under a variety of scenarios which have not been considered in previous studies. Our study shows that the model works well in a number of scenarios but its accuracy drops with high throughput values or when tested on different hardware. We further show that a non-linear model can greatly improve the accuracy in these two cases.

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Modeling WiFi Active Power/Energy Consumption in Smartphones

We report the first measurement study of 802.11n power consumption in smartphones. Using a popular 802.11n-enabled smartphone and an 802.11n wireless testbed, we evaluate the power and energy consumption on the phone for a variety of configurations including different MAC bitrates, frame sizes, and channel conditions. We contrast our results against recent studies using 802.11n wireless cards for desktop/laptop computers. Our findings have significant implications in the design of energy efficient rate adaptation algorithms for the next generation of 802.11n-enabled smartphones.

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A first look at 802.11n power consumption in smartphones

We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation of a class of WiFi active power/energy consumption models for smartphones that are based on parameters readily available to the upper layers of the protocol stack. We first consider a number of parameters used by previous models and show their limitations. We then focus on a recent approach modeling the active power consumption as a function of the application layer throughput. We study the properties of a previously proposed throughput-based model in relation to other parameters such as the packet size and/or the transport layer protocol, and we evaluate its accuracy under a variety of scenarios that have not been considered in previous studies. Our results show that the model works well in a number of scenarios, with both 802.11n- and 802.11ac-equipped smartphones, and its accuracy can be largely improved with the knowledge of transport layer protocol and packet size. However, such knowledge makes the model more complex and results in largely reduced accuracy in high throughput settings or on hardware different from the one that was used for training. We further discuss a few practical issues related to the measurement and modeling methodology.

Experimental Evaluation of WiFi Active Power/Energy Consumption Models for Smartphones

We conduct the first experimental study of the performance of link quality-based routing metrics in an 802.11n wireless mesh network (WMN). Link quality-based metrics have been shown to significantly outperform the traditional hopcount metric but they have only been evaluated over legacy 802.11a/b/g radios. The new 802.11n standard introduces a number of enhancements at the MAC and PHY layers (MIMO technology, channel bonding, frame aggregation, short guard interval, and more aggressive modulation and coding schemes) marking the beginning of a new generation of 802.11 radios. Our study in a 21-node indoor 802.11n WMN testbed reveals that the gains of link quality-based metrics over the hopcount metric in legacy 802.11 WMNs do not carry over in 802.11n MIMO WMNs. We analyze the causes of this behavior and make recommendations for the design of new routing metrics in 802.11n WMNs.

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Ramanujan K. Sheshadri

Papers

Power-throughput tradeoffs of 802.11n/ac in smartphones

Modeling WiFi Active Power/Energy Consumption in Smartphones

A first look at 802.11n power consumption in smartphones

Experimental Evaluation of WiFi Active Power/Energy Consumption Models for Smartphones

Comparison of routing metrics in 802.11n wireless mesh networks